i owe you an apology miyazaki, i wasnt really familiar with your game

i have learned to love dark souls. the atmosphere is great, the way the world is connected is amazing, and i love the combat system. almost everything is amazing, except lost izalith which is the worst shit ever.

o&s and gwyn are awesome. pretty much every boss is. excellent game.

Got this game to see what all the fuss was about. I don't know where to begin, but luckily I wrote a rough review way back when so I wouldn't forget what it was like.

Good stuff:

Character design
•being able to create a personalized character
•creative enemy designs and some NPCS

fashion souls
•so many wearable outfits to choose from

Atmosphere
•dark atmosphere which fits the name of the game very well

Exploration (somewhat)
•being able to either slightly branch off paths or at the very least do things in different orders

Bad stuff:

Difficulty
•getting through the gauntlet of enemies is more annoying and infuriating than the bosses themselves
•some mid bosses are harder than the final boss
•carnal demon is in such a small boss area
•ornstein and smough

Level design
•blighttown
•skeleton catacombs
•tomb of the giants
•warping isn't available until after anor londo so backtracking was the only way to move around until then

NPC 'lore'
•NPCs barely talk
•most lore is given through item descriptions so anything can be missed very easily for the more casual player

Music (lack thereof)
•no music except for bosses

Multiplayer
•multiplayer can add to frustration in the idea of being invaded at inoppurtune times

Armor
•armor barely protects against attacks
•armor hinders roll-dodging

In conclusion, when I beat this game I didn't feel satisfied and haven't done another full run since.

The most breathtaking gaming experience of my life. This game changed the way I play games, and taught me patience. It challenged me to use my natural human ability to learn. I will hold this game inside my heart forever.
My first playthrough is highlighted by community engagement with other players, discovering new information and secrets about the game as I went. It was also full of moments of complete defeat and desperation, contrasted by the ecstacy of overcoming a challenge that truly cannot be compared. An excitement I will likely never experience again.

Dark Souls is a summation of a lot of different parts, some action, some RPG, some adventure/metroidvania, and some experiential type game. It's a very cool melting pot to study, because many of these elements are insignificant until they mesh into the whole of the experience. In other words, Dark Souls is more than the sum of its parts. Because of this, there's no better way to start a positive Dark Souls review than by saying its combat isn't all that good.

There's no universal way to measure depth, but I suppose we can start by asking how a game creates decisions for the player. In melee combat games, that often means asking how a player can apply their moves, for example. "Can I damage the enemy?" (The answer is universally yes.) "Can I do hitstun? Can I knock them down? Launch them up? Into each other? Into walls or some other environmental hazard or gimmick? Can I hit multiple guys with this move? Does it make my character move in a way that can be useful? Does it apply some other property?" You'll find the moves in Dark Souls often answer "No" to the above. (Although ironically, the last one gets a "Yes" from parries and backstabs because of their iframes, good stuff there Dark Souls). Also it is important to ask how your option can do any of these things (aiming, timing, positioning), since being able to do these things unconditionally gives you DMC2 guns.

These interactions are not big on their own, but different interactions with enemies allows for players' individual skills and temperaments to shine, which is one of the coolest things about games. When you do hitstun to a guy to stop him from putting out attacks, you employ a crude, but still very real strategy of threat management. It might be a stretch to call it creativity, but it does reward some kind of tactical thinking on behalf of the player, since you give yourself an opportunity to focus on other guys (or do chunks of damage to this guy). Now when you realize your sword swings in such a way where it can do that to 2-3 guys at once, that strategy starts to have variants that are harder but more rewarding to execute. When you start to layer all of these interactions and properties on top of one-another, you create some great spaces for player skill to shine. It's a shame when you realize you can break lock-on and attempt this stuff, only for the game to throw giant enemies who have never heard of this "hitstun" concept at you (yes I know they poise break if you hit them 5 times, good luck doing that before they get an attack out).

The defensive options are more interesting. Shielding, blocking, parrying, and just plain moving out of the way all have their own pros and cons in terms of stamina use, timing required, and counterattack opportunities, and it’s nice when the enemies don’t force you into using one in a Simon Says manner (except for when they do), because then there's no decision. It’s really in the level design that the combat starts to get interesting. Walls and pits routinely throw wrenches into your plans, as they limit the directions you can approach enemies from or dodge into. Enemies bodyblock you and do close in on you, so you’re encouraged (usually) to keep them on one side of you, and getting cornered is often fatal. The game often asks you to lure enemies out of cramped hallways into more arenas, or use walls as cover from projectiles, enforcing a methodical approach. Many of the games' systems as well as its more semi-scripted ambushes punish impatience and players who refuse said approach. It may not offer as many decisions on a second-to-second basis as many action games, but it does ask you to consider the ones you do make pretty carefully.

Sen's Fortress demonstrates all of these things the most, and for that it’s my favorite. The pendulums are more dynamic than spikes or pits, so backing up from a snake guy can be a pretty interesting challenge in itself. At one point you fight a snake guy in a cramped hallway, but you'll realize that the spaces you have to lure him to are occupied by either another snake guy or an axe trap, and it becomes especially frantic if you rush things and aggro both of them. You can play aggressive and risky and kill him quickly, you can go for a parry which is made more satisfying by the added tension (very simple but it is effective), or you can use your brains and go behind the axe and lure the snake into it. It can be kind of a tedious formality to lure a single enemy out and fight him for a bit (see the clams at the end of Crystal Cave), and it's nice to see the game making that interaction more interesting. The gimmicks of this area are why it's so good, as they build on top of the existing systems and common interactions very nicely (they even make running past enemies more fun!) Luring snakes into the traps rewards a player's understanding and willingness to experiment (and also their timing), and it's often a very memorable and sometimes comedic experience. It also puts the player in the adventurer's mindset more, simultaneously creating more approaches to the game while making the player feel smaller, as they rely on wit and clever tricks to get by instead of strength. Snake Fortress amplifies the strengths of the combat in its rewarding of observation and nuanced positioning, and I do wish there were more levels that tried something similar.

So while I wouldn't call Dark Souls a masterclass in combat design, the moment-to-moment gameplay is still solid. This is a good thing because even if the combat was much, much worse, there's still a decent chance I would have gotten enveloped by this game anyways. See, Dark Souls is an RPG, and the point of the RPG is to use your imagination and play pretend. So in Dark Souls, I can put on a cool witch's hat. I may have gotten it off some corpse which appears after you beat a jank boss fight, but I can pretend I got it somewhere cool. I can put a cloak on but with armor leggings and gauntlets, and pretend my character has armor on under it. I can pretend my character is intimidating and everyone knows she wields a greatsword (and has a cool witch hat) because the greatsword pose evokes that idea, even when none of the NPCs express that at all. These things have no mechanical relevance at all, but they're still a powerful way to get people like me to play, often too powerful. I've had long play sessions of games I don't actually like because of these hooks on my imagination, and I often end up exhausted afterwards, even when (and in fact probably because) the game in question is not high-octane or mechanically interesting at all. To my knowledge entire games can be built on this, and that's how the modern RPG actually started with pen-and-paper games. I wouldn't actually know since I've never played Dungeons and Dragons because I have better things to do than play games all day. These elements can be kind of addictive in the wrong hands, which might be at least partly the reason why I played this game 4 times in less than a month.

However, it’s not just the cosmetics that accomplish this, the game is almost uncompromising in allowing the player to form this connection with it. That’s an annoying way of saying that Dark Souls does not feature many interruptions. With the exception of a few skippable cutscenes, the game never takes you out of the shoes of your character. Location reveals never feature camera pans if you don’t want them to, menus are real time, death is contextualized, and the only load times happen when you die (and warp but everyone knows the second half of the game is worse). Normally, I think replacing loading screens with something else is stupid, because games can be ported and loading screen time can be cut down, whereas walking sections and elevators can’t. Dark Souls, partially because of its interconnectivity, and partially because it’s so effective at pulling you into the world that I think it earns it. I don’t know if you know this, but the game’s difficulty is a pretty big selling point for most people. For me, the secondary effect it has on selling you on this grim, dour, dickhead of a world is far stronger. The lack of warping is something that certainly has its flaws, it can create tedium in a way that’s not fully intentional and thus hard to really remove in future iterations. It’s a pretty bold choice in a game where movement is slow and basic, and I’m glad the game didn’t fall back on such a concession. The result is something that can be very off putting, but also deeply engrossing in allowing you to soak up the world, and I think it’s a net positive. Combined with the role-playing, these elements make the game insanely hard to put down. On three separate occasions I booted up the game, unsure of how much I was gonna play, only to find myself going from the Asylum to Anor Londo each time, which is roughly 5-6 hours. I think this is a massive accomplishment in a game where dying can be so disheartening, and travel can be so cumbersome. Each of those runs gave me quite a few opportunities to put the damn thing down, yet still I did not.

The nice thing about the world and RPG stuff is that they don’t just help the game from the atmospheric angle, but also from the mechanical one, elevating the combat even further. Obviously there’s the satisfaction of making progress at all (bonfires, bosses, shortcuts). More interesting to talk about is how the game is quite open in its routing, complimented by thoughtful item placement. As you may know, using the master key opens a door from Firelink to Valley of Drakes, which allows you to do Taurus Demon, Gargoyles, Capra, Quelag, the infested chopper butterfly, or Sif first (also Pinwheel or Stray Demon). For example, if you do Sif first, you can get Havel’s ring, the Grass Crest shield, a chance at a black knight weapon, and some upgrade materials along the way (and a bunch of souls). It might be the last word you’d expect to describe Dark Souls with, but going through the first half of the game can be pretty arcadey through its routing and lack of interruptions. The freedom in tackling objectives also compliments the different builds = different experiences design quite well. Pyromancers have an entire new resource to manage (and here the clumping enemies thing is real!), greatsword wielders have to commit to their attacks even more, and have to worry far more about their stamina management. The tradeoff is that everyone else has to deal with the fact that they can’t stunlock half the bestiary because they don’t have a greatsword. It’s a little less interesting in the case of a linear damage buff such as Gold Pine Resin vs the Gargoyles, but even that is helped along by the permanence of losing that item and failing the fight, and the tension that creates (I mean it’s probably really tedious if you actually do fail to kill them and lose all your pine resin but it neva happened to be so idc). In other words, Dark Souls is not particularly interesting on the most micro level (you versus a single guy like that Crystal Cave Clam encounter), but the more you zoom out and look at the bigger picture or more macro level, the stronger the game becomes. They built something very impressive on top of those middling systems.

The RPG stuff has its issues (managing menus is usually not fun, min-maxing is probably too strong, your weapon type choices do get more limited as the game goes on), but it’s also a net positive. I do also wish the game had more bottlenecks like New Londo, as that one door can open up so much of the game. It’s worth noting that you can open it up without the master key, since you can fight your way through New Londo and lower the water there, opening up another path to Drake Valley. I like this more since it’s reliant on the core mechanics rather than the basic hard-locked door and key interaction that adventure games have been relying on since they’ve been able, and combines the macro fun of opening up the world with a micro challenge. The catacombs kind of has something like this, in that you can gun it down there for certain items like the scythe, which is a very fun and unique challenge at low levels, the franticness of dealing with the respawning skeletons is fun! However, because the catacombs are much more isolated from the rest of the game, it’s nowhere near as rewarding to do (also the graveyard being lower than the shrine and next to a building that players will be attracted to is probably why new players go there instead of Undead Burg which is accessed through some ledge and is higher which could communicate being harder lol). There’s certainly other rough spots in the game, such as Tomb of the Giants, the catacombs having a dark room with the fucking wheel guys and locking you out of the bonfire unless you hit some arbitrary cutscene (iirc maybe I’m wrong), Lost Izalith, the Snake Fortress boulder cheating and changing directions for no reason, enemies being able to hit through walls getting very egregious sometimes (AL Titanite Demon, Ornstein), Tomb of the Giants, the trio of shitty Demon Ruins bosses, Capra Demon, random item drops and their potential for skinner box scenarios (especially stupid in a game with items placed in the environments, tail weapons, shops, guaranteed drops, unrespawning enemies, and more), Bed of Chaos and its incredible runback, O&S runback (but actually you can jump over the staircase like in speedruns and its much better), Tomb of the Giants, etc. Even beyond my more core issues, the game is about as far from perfect as any game could reasonably be.

However, I think the game does triumph over its many different flaws. I’ve spent quite a long time searching for a game that marries the imaginary fun of roleplaying with actually fun mechanics. Dark Souls is not that game, but it is much better at it than I think any of the other ones I’ve played. It’s easy to get lost talking about all the things the game isn’t, which is probably just true for any game. Criticism tends to take up more words than celebration (especially when nobody disagrees with the praise so you don’t actually need to qualify it or yourself). Certainly there are things I wish Dark Souls did more of, but given how much I’ve played it (and I don’t hate myself for it), I think it’s done a lot right. It’s almost unmatched in its atmosphere for me, pulling me into a world so effectively, which is probably doubly impressive because it’s a pretty unpleasant place to be. I’m probably not the most qualified to explain how the game creates its tone and atmosphere, but the uninterrupted nature of it has to be some part of it, while also making the game more fun to play. For that, I wouldn’t say Dark Souls is a striking piece of art because its story is deep or important, but because it plays to the strengths of its medium and ends up becoming a whole experience that is so, so unique.

But I haven’t played the 5 other games so maybe it’s not lol

it’s crazy how this game came out slightly before Skyrim and yet does so many things soooo much better. I feel like it simultaneously feels more and less dated in terms of the world and overall presentation of the game in some ways..

I’ve never really understood people who complained about blackreach, and I know for a fact that they have never been to blighttown. It really does make Skyrim look like a game that was build for babies (which it is but I guess that just makes me a baby)

It’s also INSANE…!!!!!!…!!!.!.!.!!!
that we have gotten ds2, 3, bloodborne, sekiro AND Elden Ring which are all masterpieces of games in their own right that are incredibly fleshed out and surpassingly impactful and innovative each in their own ways while we have seen NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE WHATSOEVER from the elder scrolls in this time… actually blows my mind it just isn’t close at all. From/bethesda are not even close to being on the same level , honestly just sell the elder scrolls IP to someone who actually cares, or just wait around until the Skyrim modders just make it themselves

Maybe I will give it a 10 once I finally beat it someday. This game has certainly made me understand where Skyrim falls short as a game. Dark souls maybe the most unmatched dark fantasy atmosphere of all time.

9/10 I’m gonna go play morrowind